Holiday Harping
by fake plastic trees
Summary: Leon is excessively brutal with the truth about holidays. Yuffie is not amused.


**holiday harping  
**_or in which leon denounces everything_

I believe there is something incredibly wrong with the person who decided that _Leon_ was a good influence on kids. Mostly, this means my dad, but there were many other kids in Hollow Bastion that suffered baby-sitting from the infamous speech-giving, holiday-denouncing, fur-collared-wearing Squall Leonhart, who is now know as…Leon Leonhart.

If that's not a dead giveaway, I don't know what is.

Anyways, Pops, in all his great thinking glory, seemed to think fur-collared somebodies were pretty cool and announced that he would be my baby-sitter until I was twenty and capable of tying my own shoes and making peanut-butter sandwiches. Newsflash, old man, my shoes were _Velcro_, and I'd been playing with knives since my mom popped me out.

Seriously. Legend has it that I cut my own umbilical cord.

Jay-kay.

Right, so it was around Christmas (or as Squall says 'the time of year when you lose more brain cells that normal, apparently') when I was toddling about, six-years-old and glorious, completely content to stick snow in his shoes and hope Santa had his back turned when Squall, the little ray of sunshine, decided to spring the news on me.

"Yuffie, I'm gay," he said, all seriousness, "but you can't tell anyone 'cause I'm lusting after Cloud, and Aerith punches hard."

Okay, so maybe it wasn't like that.

"Yuffie, you do realize there's no Santa Claus, right?" he said venomously, poison dripping from his fangs as he blow-dried his shoes. "It's all just a ploy to get people to spend money and make rich people richer."

Just like that, my dreams were shattered! My hopes crushed! My happiness deflated! My – yeah, I don't have anything else. But I was six! Six! Six was when you wrote letter to Santa and your dad faxed it out, saying that Santa had wireless connection and we didn't need to worry about him picking up the phone!

So I sulked. And sulked. And sulked some more until he gave me candy and everybody was forgiven.

Until Easter, that is.

"Yuffie, the Easter bunny isn't real. Anyways, bunnies don't lay eggs."

And the tooth fairy.

"What? Oh, didn't you know? Your dad puts that under your pillow, and then he throws out the tooth."

…and when I tried to change religion and attempted to celebrate Hanukkah…

"How do you know He exists, anyways?"

…Let it be said he was blow-drying his shoes for a _long _time.

Of course, he chased me around a lot, but the big lumberjack couldn't catch me. I was a roller-skate. A super-fast, super-new, super-cool roller-skate, and he was wearing ten pound weights around his feet. Hah! Catch me now, Sunshine!

Well of course, after a while I just gave up on holidays all together, and he left me alone for the most part until I started to think of new places to put packs of snow. Like in his pockets. In his hood. In his hair, in his mouth, up his nose, packed inside his pants, the list goes on and on…

Huh. I guess that's why he never let me go outside during the wintertime for a looooong time.

Nevertheless, the shining heroine plowed forth, diving from religion to religion, fairy to fairy, until I decided there was one day out of the entire year that he had no way to shatter my image of.

Halloween.

Yeah, that's right. I didn't believe in witches or ghosts or whatever anyways, so I did it for the candy, and suffice to say, I scare the _crap_ out of Squall when I'm on a sugar-high. He just runs right out the door and hides in a closet with a plushie that he made of Cloud.

Candy is so useful.

So this year, as tradition dictates, I went trick-or-treating. 'Course, I got some funny looks, being seventeen and all, but I went with Sora, who flew in from Destiny Islands to, as he put it, 'get me some freaking candy'. His friend Ricky came along with him, too. Ricky. Ricardo. Rick. Rik. Rikster. Riku! Yeah, that was the guy. Having silver hair adds to the creepy factor, methinks.

Being older and capable of walking much faster than the little kids, let it be said that we managed a couple rounds and successfully gained enough loot to send me into hibernation for two years.

Squall, of course, was terrified.

I, of course, was ecstatic. Downright happy. Exuberant. Cloud told me to lay off the sauce, but I ignored him and sang songs from _West Side Story_. You could imagine how well that went with Squall.

"Yuffie, you keep eating candy and your teeth are going to rot and you won't be able to talk anymore without having a translator fluent in Stupid," he shouted from his hiding place in the closet and I promptly stopped singing.

That man is getting _so much ice_ in his pants this year.


End file.
